Teacher's Day

This post is written a day after 5th September, which is officially celebrated as Teacher's Day in India. Yesterday might have reminded you or made you feel nostalgic about how it was in your schooldays when this day was celebrated, maybe some speech reminding of the origins of Teacher's Day, honouring of teachers or just a day that we would treat slightly differently from our regular schooldays - maybe we came wearing casuals that day or didn't have much studies.

Regardless, this post is about my reflections on a few sentences I read in a book and it hits several years after being out of the school system and in the real world (tm) - that everything around you is a guru (original statement), and you might have also been a teacher to someone else by now, whether you'd have realised it, like it or not.

When you were a kid, you might have begun with the thought that teachers are the ones who stand before you in front of the classroom and "teach", the first people you call as "sir" or "ma'am" and learnt to have a default sense of fear (or respect) towards, or both (or none, if you were rebellious). Or maybe your tuition teacher, or guru, if you learnt an art form (like music or dance) or were in a family that followed spiritual teachings.

You might have gradually expanded that definition to include your parents, as they were your first teachers, even before you attended school. This is usually also a cliché added to the speeches you hear often on this topic.

But when you've spent years in your career, you'd have learnt from (formal or informal) mentors, seniors, or being an apprentice and watching others work too. From your managers and supervisors, from your circumstances and the overall culture. From your juniors too. From that deadline you missed, or the one that you just managed to scrape through. You might have been fortunate or you might have not been fortunate in the conventional way. But you can't take away what you learnt, either way.

Coming out of the circle of work and authority figures into your personal life, your friends. Your siblings and extended family. Your interactions with them. Your peers. Your spouse (if you're married). Your romantic relationships, successful and failed both. Your betrayals, and also interactions that restored your faith. If you have experienced it, your dates. Your exes. Your past. Your present. Not only the things that you want to talk about, but also things you don't want to touch. Like it or not, sometimes the presence or absence of these things teach you a lot more about yourself than you yourself could.

In public life, the society and community you are a part of. What is said, what is followed and what is said and isn't and all permutations and combinations herein. All dynamically changing because what's acceptable today may not be tomorrow, and vice versa. Strangers you meet - whether you met them once in fleeting circumstances or were able to see them again. Circumstances you have been in so far with respect to all of them, and more. Your interactions with customer service. That sales call in the middle of nowhere, or that salesperson in the shop who sold (or did not sell) you something. That shopkeeper. That delivery executive. That service provider. If you're a customer, the business owner/service provider/vendor you're seeking services from. If you're a business owner, your customer or client.

Teachers aren't just humans; they can be phenomena, or virtual too. Like that ad that caught your attention or caused you to repulse. That opinion piece. That movie. Your chats with these flashy new LLMs. What went viral, what didn't. Those newsletters/Substacks you read, those promotional emails. The spam messages that you might have read. Those forum and group discussions on whatever platform you may be on. The threads. Those WhatsApp forwards. The YouTubers or independent creators you watch, regardless of platform. The artists. The art. The comics. The political landscape, and the world stage. The natural landscape, trees, plants, animals (although we get to see less of it progressively). Even Bengaluru's traffic - it can either teach you patience, mindfulness, or if you're listening to some podcast on your commute, some skill, or whatever your imagination can hold responsibly as you drive. For the people responsible to fix this, how to handle situations when the pipe isn't as thick as it should have been, and the fluid is not in laminar flow.

So far I've just talked about the past and the present, but this also includes those circumstances that are going to happen in the future. While the past presents valuable priors and the present is what it is, the future holds teachings too, that are yet to come. We may not know them yet - or be fully aware, but acknowledging what it holds in store nevertheless is also something I consider important.

And on the flip side, if you hold a mirror to all of them, you'll find that maybe someone else would have learnt something out of you (even if it was an inanimate algorithm). While you can't tell if they certainly did or not unless they tell you explicitly, if you can imagine having the insight that "you learnt from everything", then you can also hold in your imagination that everything else learnt from you in the same way, like if you swap out the underlying reference of the pronoun "you" with something else picked out of the set of "everything", it still seems to make sense - not in a "mathematical proof" kind of way but in the intuitive kind of way.

With that, I'd like to wish a Happy Teacher's Day to the whole world. And while I'm not in a role that makes me a teacher formally, if anyone wishes me a Happy Teacher's Day after reading this, I'd wish them - "Same to you :)".